It's about time! This is the time for you to call your congressman or write a letter to the editor and call for support of PRAs (Personal Retirement Accounts)

Excerpt:

Congressional Republicans, after three months of internal debate, this weekend launched a months-long campaign to try to convince constituents that rewriting the Social Security law would be cheaper and less risky than leaving it alone, as the White House opened a campaign to pressure several Senate Democrats to support the changes.

The Republicans left an annual retreat in the Allegheny Mountains with a 104-page playbook titled "Saving Social Security," a deliberate echo of the language President Bill Clinton used to argue that the retirement system's trust fund should be built up in anticipation of the baby boomers' retirement.

By default, workers would be enrolled in a "life cycle" account, in which investments become more conservative as investors age, if they do not choose one of the other options, according to two officials speaking on condition of anonymity. [...]

In devising a structure for the private accounts, the Bush administration is modeling its proposal after the Thrift Savings Plan, a tax-deferred retirement investment plan similar to a 401(k). The idea is to minimize risk for people at the outset by offering as few as three to five diversified investment funds.

Bush said in December that his plan would make sure people could not invest "in a frivolous fashion."

Under the Thrift Savings Plan, federal workers have five investment options, including government and corporate bond funds, a stock fund that tracks the S&P 500, an international fund and other stock funds.

We regularly hear from supporters of [higher spending & higher taxes] that Illinois ranks 48th in the nation in the amount of school funding provided by the state. Let me cite a few more rankings from the same study, the NEA's Rankings & Estimates.

Illinois ranks

- 14th in public school revenue per student (average daily attendance)

- 3rd in public school revenue as a percentage of combined state and local revenues

- 25th in state / local spending on education as a percentage of all spending (above national average)

- 11th in K-12 public school spending per student (average daily attendance)

This is an incredible article from TCS. In it, you not only see the dramaticly negative effects of tax structure, but the demographic seismic shift, and the ensuing tsunami that will destroy Europe.

Homebuilders can plan for a huge Boom from 2025 thru 2050. All remaining Christians in Europe will be moving here.

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Excerpt:

The Pay-As-You-Go-System and its eventual collapse..

..

Translated into a simple and straightforward language, this means that retirement age will have to be constantly raised: at first to 65 years, then (sometime in the early 2030s) to 67, and so on. To stop this growth would drag the system relatively quickly into a crisis. In other words: a pay-as-you-go system may work for another few decades, before being gradually marginalized by the rise in retirement age. The pay-as-you-go system was a huge political and economic experiment; and the generation of today's children will witness its failure.

But perhaps people will just return to the 1880s, when in

Bismarck

's

Germany

the retirement age was 70 years -- with an average life expectancy of less than 50 years. If in 2050, for instance, the official retirement age becomes 90, with an average life expectancy around 80, then the pay-as-you-go system can be sustainable in the long term. But a good social security at an age of around 60 will be completely out of the question for those who are now children.

On the other hand, if the retirement age remains unchanged, the tax burden could eventually rise up to 70-75 percent of gross wages. In such a case, however, the younger and more educated portion of working-age population would undoubtedly migrate to countries with lower taxes: particularly to

Britain

,

Ireland

, or the

United States

. These countries also have much less trouble with their demographic structure. Over the next 50 years, the

United States

may hugely benefit from accepting a wave of emigrants who will have been chased out of

I posted this letter to the Illinois Leader a few months ago. Every point in it can be applied to YOUR local district. Borrow the ideas an play with your text. Send it your local paper to stop your local tax increase.

There is another model letter below this one from another writer. If you have one of your own, email it to me and I'll put it up.

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As with most issues involving public education, one does not know where to begin. Perhaps her question; "How can anyone argue with free money from the state, no increase in taxes, and improved health, safety and opportunities for our children?" is as good a place as any.

First, let's note the silliness of her assertion that this is "free money." Like all cheerleaders for public education, the idea that taxpayers all across Illinois (some from very depressed neighborhoods and regions) are funding goodies for fairly well-to-do Palos Park never crosses her mind.

Just like the substandard healthcare in Cuba, it's supposedly "free."

Intelligent people know otherwise.

Simply look at how this funding game works. Here, the state is providing a "free" $3.3 million. All the taxpayers of Palos Park need to do to get it is tax themselves to the tune of $14 million. This is like the ridiculous joke ads on Saturday Night Live. "We lose money on every sale, but we make it up on volume!"

There is nothing "free" about public education. Whether the issue is rich salaries for a bureaucratic class, or rich contracts for expensive and connected contractors, the so-called "needs" are bottomless, and the taxpayers are always footing the bill.

Second, let us take issue with the idea that there will be "no increase in taxes." If Ms. Zylke is accurate in her statements (I find that public education's cheerleaders rarely are.), then the "back door" referendum is a scheme to deny Palos Park residents a reduction in government spending, and therefore a reduction in taxation.

If it is really true that current bonds are now paid off, then let the taxpayers have the benefit of the reduced governmental needs in the form of a cut in their property taxes.

The fact is that whether this extra $14 million is funded through new taxation (always only one election cycle away), or through the "roll-over" of existing tax payments, it is still a burden on the taxpayers.

Third, let us dispense with the myth that this money is "for the children." Study after study shows that in many districts, about 75-80% of education funding goes to payroll. Lest you think this means teachers, go to your district office and ask for a breakdown of payroll spending. (Note how difficult it is to get good information out of them.)

You will see how the system is designed to employ an entire class of bureaucrats who will never set foot inside a classroom. By some estimates, only about 26-33% of education spending gets into a classroom: http://www.freedomfoundation.us/student_____funding_ii

This system isn't "for the children," it's for the "system."

Public education in the U.S. is a shell game. We all know it's broken, and when we try to hold someone accountable, the interlocking bureaucracies circle the wagons. The teachers' unions blame the district management and the taxpayers/parents, the districts blame the teacher unions and the taxpayers/parents, the State Board blames the local boards and the taxpayers/parents, the local boards blame the State Board and the taxpayers/parents.

And at the end of it all, the taxpayers/parents are the only ones not cancelled out in the blame game. The bureaucracy gets bigger, and we foot the bill.

It is time to end this charade, and the only way to do it is to declare that the "emperor has no clothes." Public education is over-funded at every level. It is bankrupting many towns (entire states, even). Anyone truly familiar with today's education system, not to mention being familiar with educating a child, knows that this nation could be brilliantly educated for under $5000 per child (probably WAY under, as many home schoolers have proven).

The only way we will ever get the dynamic, efficient, and effective education system we need is to deny the current system its funding and the ensuing political clout this funding creates. There is no better place to start than with the local initiatives like the one in Palos Park.

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Letter 2

In the coming weeks the people of Lake County will be once again asked to vote on many tax referendums from schools to another shot at a county road tax. Supporters both for and against will give you their reasons why to vote yes or no on these issues.

On a similar note, the Illinois Lottery unclaimed jackpot of $14 million (if left unclaimed by February 1st) will go into an "education fund" for the state public schools.

Does anyone ever find it hard to believe that lottery jackpots seem to get bigger and bigger each year yet schools around the state seem to get poorer and poorer? A portion of that is always supposed to go into the schools, according to the state.

Now the state will be handed $14 Million more for schools come February 1st. Where is that money going?

According to the Winthrop Harbor school district, "all" they need is $260,000 to save their district for "good". We all know too well that every time they say this will be the last one they ask for, another 5 years later they are right back where they started from.

Maybe the educators and teacher's unions should be spending more time figuring out where all this lottery money is going and finding more ways to get that money to cover their shortcomings.

I for one am sick of constantly paying higher taxes for a broken education system. When Zion passed their referendum a couple years ago, it supposedly too was only going to cost a fraction of money each year, and would "solve" the districts issues.

Three years later, we have almost tripled in property taxes and the school system is still broke and the test scores are at an all time low.

Hopefully the people of Lake County will see throwing money at education hardly, if ever, works. And hopefully one day we might actually see things like lottery money actually get put back into the school system.

Great Article by VDH. I'm on many lists with "conservative curmudgeons" and other prophets of doom.

If you are forced to suffer these folks because of your interest in politics, this article is the antidote to their pessimism.

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Excerpt: (see my comment below)

Nowhere in the world is the rule of law as stable in the United States, which is the most transparent society on the globe and thus the most trusted for investors and entrepreneurs–no surprise given its hallowed Constitution and Bill of Rights. Parris notes the presence abroad of thousands of American troops, but does not ask whether any other country has, or will have, the air or sea lift capacity to project such power, force that allowed American ships and helicopters to save thousands after the tsunami when Europe’s lone Charles de Gaulle was nowhere to be seen. China and India, for all their robust economies, have neither the ability to help victims of mass disasters nor citizenries wealthy or generous enough to give hundreds of millions to strangers abroad.

All civilizations erode, but few citizenries are as sensitive to the signs of decay as Americans, who constantly innovate, experiment, and self-critique in a fashion unknown anywhere else. When we develop a class system based on British aristocratic breeding, accent, and social paralysis, or sink into a multicultural cauldron like the endemic violence of an India or Africa, or cease believing in either God or children like an Amsterdam or Brussels, or require the state coercion of a China to maintain harmony, or become a racialist state such as Japan, then it is time to worry.

But we are not there yet by a long shot.

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If we succeed in exchanging our current corrupt and ineffective public education system with one of parental choice in a dynamic market, there is no reason why we won't be around in 200, 500 or 1000 years, in a world made in our image.

This was so good that I had to copy it whole from BrothersJudd (the best blog on the web)! GK Chesterton died long before "postmodernism." But if you know anything about Chesterton, you'd know that he predicted "postmodernism" long before some useless Ivy League professor ever thought up the term.

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INTERVIEW: with GK Chesterton: Chesterton is dismayed at the onward march of relativism and secularism. He also thinks the novel has lost its way, understands Islamic grievances against the west and is a proud mentor to satirists (Tobias Jones, January 2005, Prospect)

Tobias Jones: We'll come back to Christianity. But you mention postmodernism: what do you take it to mean?

GKC: Ha! Have you ever asked a postmodernist the meaning of postmodernism? It's all absolute hogwash, or as they would say, meta-hogwash. The whole point is that postmodernism is the negation of meaning and belief and faith. Postmoderns can't say what they mean because that would imply meaning, something they're at pains to deny. Of course, at table you can ask them to pass the mustard, and they seem perfectly able; and they know two plus two is four, even though they get very cross if you affirm your belief in objective reality. In some ways my entire oeuvre, published before and after the first world war, was dedicated to battling the nascent phenomenon of postmodernism. I described the tendency in a book called Heretics and summarised its motto with the line: "let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." That is their ambition: to be relieved of the responsibility of deciding what is good and what evil by pretending that those concepts don't exist. As George Bernard Shaw, the first postmodernist, wrote in his The Quintessence of Ibsenism, "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule."

TJ: Might that not be sensible in a multi-faith society? The intolerance and absolutism of monotheism can be swapped for the tolerance of multiculturalism.

GKC: Dear dear, I can see that you too have been hoodwinked. That is their rhetoric: tolerance, the peaceful coexistence of competing beliefs. In reality, now that their heresy has become enshrined as orthodoxy, you're not even allowed to express a belief. Take, for example, the country which was the cradle of this silly craze: France. There, tolerance apparently implies that one isn't even allowed into school with a veil. Come come. If I may quote myself again, "the old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it." Or take the case of Rocco Buttiglione and his interrogation before joining the European commission: he expressed a personal belief about homosexuality and distinguished between a sin and a crime. That distinction is the cornerstone of a secular body politic; in a theocracy, and in liberal totalitarianism, it is non-existent. Buttiglione was displaying both sincerity and subtlety and tolerance. What could be more tolerant than a man believing that something is wrong but allowing it to happen because he accommodates other beliefs? By contrast, postmoderns believe in nothing and so countenance no dissent.

TJ: You're not seriously telling me we're less tolerant than we were, say, in the Edwardian era?

GKC: My dear boy, I think you're mistaking tolerance for relativism. If the only dogma you have is tolerance, the only thing you believe in is relativism. What nobility is there in tolerance if you don't believe in anything in the first place? You're like someone who makes a great show of denying themselves something they didn't even want anyway. It's an illusion of virtue. Your entire morality, if so it can be called, is negative: against racism and against sexism and against war and so on and so forth.

TJ: We do believe in things: democracy, freedom....

GKC: Your thinking is irredeemably muddled. Those are means, not ends. You can't say you believe in democracy per se. You would have to tell me what you believe democracy can achieve. Besides, I think you're confusing liberty with libertinism, freedom -- as Milton said -- with licence. Freedom, for your generation, implies the removal of all constraint. That's not freedom but licentiousness; from a Christian point of view, it's nothing other than the complete removal of freedom. It is slavery to sin. You see, freedom only has meaning if it is accompanied by morality, if it implies a choice between good and evil. You can hardly blame the vast majority of the Arab world if they equate your freedom with immorality because they know that you no longer believe in good and evil. A few decades into my afterlife I met Viktor Frankl, and I greatly admired his notion that if the east coast of America has a statue of liberty, the west one desperately requires a statue of responsibility. The one without the other has no meaning. Talk all you want about human rights, gay rights, women's rights, - but I insist that you tell me what you think are the complementary human responsibilities, gay responsibilities, women's responsibilities. That is why I wrote in What's Wrong With The World that: "Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities."

Given that I'm an implacable foe of increasing spending on our failed public education system, it is fair to ask what alternatives I propose. After all, if you are going to question today's sacred cows, you had better have something to offer in their stead.

I do. Be forewarned however, that my solutions are not more fantasy (as is the belief that our current system works). The solutions proposed are good, but they aren't the current flavor of "mind candy" that today's suburban parents ingest.

What about the districts in poorer suburbs and rural areas that may truly need more resources.

Good question. Before we engage in a silly tax shifting scheme, lets discern a reasonable "state average". Next, pass a law that any district that spends above the state average (perhaps Chicago needs some sort of exemption) gets no state aid whatsoever.

If Lake Forest and Deerfield are reaming their citizens to the tune of $15-17K per student per year, they don't need a dime of state money. Not for special needs, not for infrastructure, nothing.

Uniform Reporting / Uniform Disclosure

Every school district should have a web page that has mandated information prominantly displayed with in one click of the main page. Uniform accouting is one key, and uniform disclosure of all curricula choices.

This will be fought tooth and nail by the districts, which are inbred, interlocked engines of corruption. Just making it an issue will expose their problems.

Enabling Legislation for Local Choice

If the state enables districts to allow choice, then those organizations that wish to can engage the choice debate at the local level, with out interference and obfuscation by the state.

If you haven't noticed the little shell game these people play, bringing this issue to the fore will be instructive. When you want to do "X", the state stops you...when you ask the state, it's the Superindent's responsibility...but the Superintendent's hand are tied (doncha know) because of "contract clauses" and "State mandates."

You're a ding bat if you buy any of this. Get local choice enabled, and watch 20 schools open in Bellwood. When poor black kids start reading better than the suburban kids, even the doped white mice in Lake Forest will take notice.

Cut Administration to the bone

Oak Park is just one example of the massive "over bloat" in adminstrative salaries. Click the window below.

SEVEN Directors? What is a director? Do they teach? Direct traffic? Direct taxpayer money into their wallets? Tell me Oak Park needs 7 "Directors" at three quarters of a million dollars. Go on, tell me.

Guidance Counselors? At nearly a million in salary. Wake UP! This is featherbedding at its finest. If you want counseling for your kid, hire one. Lets see if the market has a demand for this "service."

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How many scandals, failed curricula experiments, and tax increases will it take to get to see the nature of this animal? I haven't even told you about their pension scamming yet.